Launching a new streaming music service in 2014 is not for the faint of heart. Companies like Spotify and Pandora have significant market share, Apple entered the space in 2013 with the launch of iRadio, and electronics giant Samsung wants in on the action, too.

Sometimes it takes a little human intervention to make semantic applications easier to build. The Guardian newspaper has augmented its Open Platform API with unique identifiers for bands and books. In turn, the company has simplified the process of creating a mashup that uses multiple sources to focus on a single work, which may help its content spread farther.

In what might be a first in the world of open APIs and mashups, a developer has been sued by a major corporation for developing an application using a third party web service API. As TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid reports, Ryan Sit, the talented developer behind a number of popular mashups is being sued by EMI for his application Favtape because it uses the Seeqpod API. Of course it's not unusual for a record label to aggressively use the courts to defend copyright, but this appears to take the battle to a new ground. As Jason describes: